Digital music production processes trace a great amount of processes and objects. The important flow of these traces calls for a system to support their interpretation. We have studied and developed such a system in the digital music production context -within the Gamelan research project -towards musical object and process reconstitution. We present the results we obtained from combining trace engineering, knowledge modeling and knowledge engineering, based on the differential elaboration of a strongly-committed ontology, standard formats and common knowledge management tools. We conclude by discussing some hypotheses about trace-based knowledge management, digital music preservation and reconstitution, opening on to some considerations about artistic style and digital humanities aspects.

The adequacy of a programming language to a given software project or application domain is often considered a key factor of success in software development and engineering, even though little theoretical or practical information is readily available to help make an informed decision. In this paper, we address a particular version of this issue by comparing the adequacy of general-purpose synchronous programming languages to more domain-specific languages (DSL) in the field of computer music. More precisely, we implemented and tested the same lookup table oscillator example program, one of the most classical algorithms for sound synthesis, using a selection of significant synchronous programming languages, half of which designed as specific music languages -Csound, Pure Data, SuperCollider, ChucK, Faust -and the other half being general synchronous formalisms -Signal, Lustre, Esterel, Lucid Synchrone and C with the OpenMP Stream Extension (Matlab/Octave is used for the initial specification). The advantages of these two approaches are discussed, providing insights to language designers and possibly software developers of both communities regarding programming languages design for the audio domain.

Digital studios trace a great amount of processes and artifacts. The important flow of these traces calls for a system to support their interpretation and understanding. We present our design and development of such a system in the digital music production context, within the Gamelan research project. This trace-based system is structured in three main layers: track production process, interpret collected traces according to a dedicated domain ontology, help querying and visualizing to foster production understanding. We conclude by discussing some hypotheses about trace-based knowledge engineering and digital music production understanding.

Faustine is the first interpreter for the digital audio signal processing language Faust and its vector extension. This domainspecific language for sample-based audio is highly expressive and can be efficiently compiled. Faustine has been designed and implemented, in OCaml, to validate the Faust multirate vector extension proposed in the literature, without having to modify the sophisticated Faust scalar compiler. Moving to frame-based algorithms such as FFT is of paramount importance in the audio field and, more broadly, in the multimedia signal processing domain. Via the actual implementation of multidimensional FFT and morphological image processing operations, Faustine, although unable to process data in real time, illustrates the possible advantages and shortcomings of this vector extension as a language design proposal. More generally, our paper provides a new use case for the vision of interpreters as lightweight software platforms within which language design and implementation issues can be easily assessed without incurring the high costs of modifying large compiler platforms. 5 http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yampa

Les recherches décrites ici abordent la problématique de la préservation à long terme du processus temps réel dans la création contemporaine utilisant le numérique. En effet, nous avons développé une stratégie d’abstraction, laquelle consiste à générer automatiquement une documentation mathématique qui explicite la sémantique d’un processus, représentée uniquement à l’aide de la notation mathématique et du langage naturel. L’objectif et l’enjeu de cette approche sont à situer dans le statut auto-suffisant de cette documentation, en tant que support autonome pour la réimplémentation.